• Temporize
• Web log
  2009
• 05/01/09

I first read about this camera about a month or so back on WIRED, and was quite impressed by the technical specifications. But after actually seeing what this camera is capable of – via a video brought to my attention by my good friend Spencer Sternberg — I’d have to say that ‘impressed’ is a slight understatement. Below is a video filmed by Guardian photographer Dan Chung entirely on a production Canon EOS5DmkII using manual focus. The film was shot an edited in about twelve hours directly after picking the camera up from a Beijing camera store and charging the battery.

Stunning.

Canon EOS5DmkII, One night in Beijing. from Dan Chung on Vimeo.

I’m really happy to see that Songbird have added a new icon with the new release candidate of version 1. Songbird is a open-source customisable music player which has been in development for almost 3 years now (version 0.1 was released Feb 2006). Previously, the icon for the application was an egg that got closer to hatching with each new release leading up to version 1. I thought this was a great concept and was sad to see it dropped for a generic pair of headphones with the 1.0 RC1 update. Although different in style, the new bird icon is quite reminiscent of that original concept, and gives the application much more personality.

This is one of those questions/comparisons that is always guaranteed to start a debate, and seems to popping up more often than not lately, starting with about a month ago when I picked up a 1971 version of Bruno Munari’s book Design As Art at a car boot sale. I’m currently reading though it, and was going to wait until I’d finished before posting about it, but the other day I was surprised to find via the CR blog that Yes Studio has just redesigned the Penguin on Design series, which includes Design As Art. I think they have done a great job of giving the publication a new face and still keeping it so in line with the content and the 1971 cover design.

Secondly, we have Is Graphic Design Art, a web poll I came across via Michael’s twitter feed, which surprisingly, shows ‘Yes’ as the general consensus. Personally, I’m in the ‘No’ camp. Sure Graphic Design and Art share many things in common, and I would definitely agree that Graphic Design is artistic, but the fundamental difference between the two is that the primary purpose of Graphic Design is to convey and deliver information, and not self expression, as I would say is the primary purpose of Art.

But hey, that’s just me …

Following on from the last post, I’ve just finished reading and interesting piece by Brad Neuberg about how flash can integrate with the open web. One of the comments of the comments I found interesting was:

“Over time Adobe has been become more and more open source friendly, contributing to open source projects and opening up their own products. However, these decisions have always been good business decisions and open sourcing Flash right now is a really bad business decision.”

A good point, though I really think open source is going to be one of, if not The, major business models of the future, and I believe most companies are going to have to go this way at some stage in order to compete in the market place. Microsoft will at some point (if they haven’t already) start eating into Adobes market and user base with their Silverlight product, so opening up Flash to the open web and significantly increasing the developers and the community involved in the product would, in my option, be a very good business decision.

Although flash is slowly making its way onto some mobile devices, Flash on the iPhone is still looking as far off as a manned mission to Mars. But with HTML 5 starting to be implemented in webkit and most other browsers, and the advancements in SVGs of late, I’ve been thinking about what roll flash will play on the iPhone, and if it is really needed at all …

At the moment, I find the fact that I can’t jump on youtube and watch my friends latest video a little annoying, but with the <video> and <audio> tag already working in safari 3, how long will it be before these are carried through to the iPhone? And with the wider adoption of such tags, will sites such as youtube continue to use flash as their default media player?

I’m a big fan of Flash, and seeing what Joshua Davis and Hi-Res were doing with the platform back in the late 90’s is what really go me into web design and playing with code in the first place, but now that I’ve had to live without flash on the iPhone for the last few month and counted the amount of times I’ve actually missed it, I’m not so sure it’s the iPhone enhancer I’ve been hoping it would be.

This morning my first issue of Voiceworks magazine went to print. Due to not managing my time well enough, and learning the ropes of a new publication, I was up until 4am getting it ready for collection this morning and came across a hurdle I had not anticipated. Poetry.

Laying out pages containing poetry proved to be a lot trickier than I had expected. I had designed a system and styles which I thought would work across all content of the magazine, whether it be a fictional pieces or part of the columns, and could work without the heavy use of graphics or supporting images.

Unfortunately poems did not fit into this system as well as I had hoped. Instead of being a piece of copy to be moulded and crafted to fit on a page, a poem already has its form and needs to be placed ‘as is’ onto the page. As I found out, this tends to cause a problem with space and the relationship with other elements. I still managed the get everything done, but I think this will need revision before I start on the next issue, and I’ll need to do a bit or research on laying out poetry.

I’d be interested to hear if anyone else has come across a similar situation.

Over the weekend I was lucky enough to take part in a fantastic letterpress workshop held by Carolyn Fraser of Idlewild Press. It was a great experience learning the ins and outs of setting type, inking and preparing the presses and how to produce our own prints.  Here are a few images from the workshop, and I have just uploaded a few more to flickr.

Following on in the ever exiting (and disappointing) ePaper advancements,  Plastic Logic have just announced the next step in electronic readers. Their as yet unnamed decive uses the same technology as Amazon’s Kiddle, but thankfully comes looking a little more like a newspaper and less like a brick. With a screen that is twice the size the Kiddle’s, Logic’s device claims to be able to provide a newspaper like layout which can be continually updated via a wireless link, storing and display hundreds of pages of newspapers, books and documents.

TG Daily has some good pics.

Here’s a little peak at the typeface I’m currently working on. There are still a few characters to go, and will need some tweaking after they are finished, so might be a little while until its all done.

Just came across this on Ffffound. Genius.